What annoys me is that this is easily achievable on today's hardware, as being proved by Infinity, but no games company seems willing to actual do it. X3 is okay, but the star map is a horrid grid, the travel between sectors is via gates (what is it with gates and space games?!) and there is no interaction with planets. On the upside you can have multiple ships, the economy is dynamic, you can build your own stations, and there are a lot of mods/plug-ins. I got so bored waiting for "Elite 4" or Infinity to be released I started making my own (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLAc1nm6w4E)!

My parents did the same thing! That's how I learn't to pick locks.

You seem to be attributing the censorship to those who do the actual censoring, whereas from what I can tell, politicians will simply do what they believe will make them most popular with the largest or safest segments of voters. If they can claim they will provide tough censorship for violence or sex, then that is less parenting that their voters are forced to do. So it seems more like it comes down to human nature. Parents are more interested in policies that allow them to not feel worried for their childrens fragile little minds when they plonk them infront of the TV for 8 hours, than they are about abstract ideas like freedom of expression. And of course politicians are more interested in policies that will get them votes than those which are in the long term best interests of the country, I guess because the kinds of long term effects that strong protection of freedom of expression or respect for particular art forms take more time to emerge than any particular politician is likely to be in office.

This will be all the more easy to achieve after they change the definition of definition.

People in above comments are talking about photogrammetry and voxels. This is not the technology refered to in this article. They specifically mention having to compress the photos to a great extent to get the game under 1 GB. I am 99% sure that what they are doing is simply storing a grid of 360 degree 'fisheye' photos, and then interpolating between them based on the camera position using some clever interpolation method. The technique is pretty obvious so I am guessing the technology they are so proud of is the interpolation method. This technique seems very restrictive to me, allowing no relighting or dynamic geometry. Its pretty much only good for this game. You can see in the video linked in a previous comment that there is no extra geometry in the scene when you are exploring it, not even your own legs ...

Except this would require accelerating to faster than the speed of light, which most people are pretty sure is impossible using current technology.

Wow, so an organisation that is mandated by the people (in as much as it is government funded) is forbidden from lobbying, but companies which are often in direct conflict with the general populace (e.g. **AA) can spend as much as they want on it?! How the hell did that come about?

And of course, even if you do buy a brand new rig the game still has a fairly good chance of not working. Out of my four most recent game purchases only Left4Dead runs for more than an hour without crashing. STALKER:CS a few crashes, but gameplay bugs that ruin most of its main features (faction wars broken, etc). FarCry 2: invariably crashes during first few minutes of game play (not gfx overheating). X3: Reunion: random crashes, broken missions. Fallout 3: crashes every 30 minutes or so (pretty much on entry to every new area). The ability to release patches via the internet seems to have given games companies the impression that it is okay to release the game in a beta state, then just use their customers as their testers. I'm thinking they should be paying us to find their bugs, rather than us paying to play their games.. Oh and to refer back to the parent, GTA 4 is apparently horribly buggy even if you can technically run it.

Just from the very top of the wiki link you posted:

And even if they were skeptics the list contains less than 50 names, hardly a sizable proportion of climate scientists. And bringing up the dead-horse hockey stick at every opportunity is a straw-man at best.

Doh, I missed the caveat about it having to be an evolved algorithm, but I still think it could be done.

Of course you could (assuming enough processing power), just have all the AI team constantly spinning 360 degrees and performing pattern matching on the visual input , as soon as a potential match is made fire at it ( to stop friendly fire have all the AI team choose the 1337 outfit and match against colour ). Also the DARPA challenge has already been beaten using pattern matching and learning algorithms (http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp).